The Materialist

Carl Andre’s eminent obscurity.

Carl Andre with his wife, Melissa Kretschmer, at their apartment in New York City. “To myself, I am invisible,” he says.Credit Photograph by Tina Barney

At a gallery opening in Chelsea a few years ago, Carl Andre, a balding man in his late sixties, wearing bib overalls and a blue work shirt, walked over to speak with Richard Serra. Andre rarely attends art events, and the two men, whom many art historians consider the most important sculptors of their generation, had not seen each other for a long time. “Oh, Carl,” Serra said, after a moment’s hesitation, “I didn’t recognize you.” “I’m like Cuba,” Andre replied, amiably. “Nobody recognizes me.”

In this country, at least, Andre’s non-recognition problem has lasted for more than two decades. Although the Paula Cooper gallery shows his work regularly, he has not had a one-man exhibition at a New York museum since 1970, and his name, as a key figure in the development of minimal art, is no longer prominent in the critical discourse. The drought is easing, though, and it will come to an end in March, 2013, when a retrospective exhibition of Andre’s work opens at the Dia Art Foundation museum, in Beacon, New York, and then travels to a number of as yet unnamed museums here and in Europe. For Yasmil Raymond, the curator who is organizing the show in collaboration with Dia’s director, Philippe Vergne, working on it has been a strange experience. “The institutional silence around Carl almost makes me think we are mounting a retrospective of an artist who is imaginary,” she told me, “because here the work is really unknown.”

It is hard to think of an artist whose career has been so affected by circumstances that have nothing to do with his art. In Andre’s case, the precipitating event was the death of his third wife, Ana Mendieta, a young artist who fell from the bedroom window of Andre’s apartment, on the thirty-fourth floor of a high-rise on Mercer Street, in the early-morning hours of September 8, 1985. Andre was charged with murder, indicted, and eventually acquitted in a non-jury trial, but Mendieta’s family and many of her friends in the art community and the feminist movement believe that he was responsible for her death. When the Guggenheim Museum put an Andre sculpture in the initial show at its SoHo branch, in 1992, the opening was picketed by five hundred angry protesters. Three years later, the Guerrilla Girls issued a poster calling Andre “the O.J. of the art world.” Andre’s many friends stood by him. When he was indicted the first time (there were three indictments, the first two of which were dismissed without going to trial), Frank Stella, whose early black-stripe paintings had been a decisive influence on Andre’s sculpture, put up about fifty thousand dollars in cash toward the amount set for his bail, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Throughout the trial, Paula Cooper kept Andre’s “Zinc-Zinc Plain (1969)” on view in her gallery. None of his previous female companions (there were quite a few) testified against him.

For several years after his acquittal, Andre spent a lot of time in Europe, where the tragedy seemed to have no effect on his reputation. European museums continued to show his work, and sales to museums and private collectors there helped to offset the almost total disappearance of his American market. When he was in New York, women crossed the street to avoid him, and wrote damning comments in the guest book at Cooper’s gallery when his work was shown there. He became more and more solitary, seeing only a few close friends. His friends sometimes wondered why he stayed on in the three-room apartment on Mercer Street, after what had happened. Carl was proud and stubborn, they said, and maybe he thought that, if he moved, it would look like an admission of guilt. Except for initial confused and somewhat contradictory statements to the police, he never talked to anyone about Mendieta’s death.

Wherever Andre was, he kept working. Andre has described himself as the first post-studio artist. He has never needed a studio, because the materials he works with—four-by-four timbers, bricks, one-foot-square metal plates, cut or natural stones, and other available hardware—are ordered from suppliers and assembled by Andre on the site. Andre does not carve, or model, or weld, or transform his materials. His great innovation was to assemble the elements of his simple, linear sculptures on the floor, without joining them together. Other contemporary sculptors had done away with pedestals and the vertical axis, but Andre’s reorientation of his work to the horizontal plane, where it functioned not as an object but, in his words, “as a place,” was more radical and more influential than anything being done by Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Dan Flavin, or the other minimalist artists in the nineteen-sixties. “Carl has the floor,” as the art crowd at Max’s Kansas City used to say. Richard Serra, who is four years younger than Andre, remembers a conversation he had with him soon after Andre’s first flat metal-plate pieces were shown at the Dwan gallery in New York, in 1967: “I said to Carl, ‘Somebody’s got to get those things up off the ground,’ and Carl said, ‘Don’t worry, somebody else will do that.’ And I thought, God damn, I’m going to do it!” Soon afterward, Serra started making his freestanding lead-prop sculptures, in which four massive, upright lead plates support each other without joints, house-of-cards style. “Carl was an enormous influence on me,” Serra said. “He changed the history of sculpture.”

The fact that you can walk on Andre’s sculptures still confuses viewers. Andre has allowed and encouraged it—with certain reservations. He doesn’t want you walking on his metal plates in stiletto heels, or in cleated boots that have snow on them, or with bare feet, whose oils can be more corrosive than rock salt, but he knows that these and other harmful actions will take place. “I stop worrying about what happens to a work after it’s out of my control,” he said to me. Most museumgoers don’t walk on his pieces. Even if they know it’s allowed, walking on a certified work of art seems transgressive, or showoffy, but the knowledge that you can do it establishes a strong physical connection between spectator and art work. Andre’s things have always struck me as inviting the kind of spectator involvement and empathy that early minimalism prided itself on ruling out. When he started making art, he once said, his goal was to make something impersonal and complete in itself, but he found that this was impossible, because “the essence of art is human association.”

Over the years, I have come to believe that Andre was never a minimal artist. He more or less confirmed this in one of the conversations I had with him last summer, in his Mercer Street apartment. We were talking about minimalist-art theory, whose proliferation in the sixties and seventies had prompted Harold Rosenberg, The New Yorker’s art critic at that time, to write, “The rule applied is: The less there is to see the more there is to say.” When I asked Andre what he thought of all the critical theorizing over minimalism, he replied, cheerfully, “I thought that was nothing but bullshit.”

On a cool day in May, Andre was waiting for me at the elevator on his floor—as he would be on every other visit. He led the way down a somewhat shabby corridor to his apartment at the far end, where Melissa Kretschmer, his wife, was drying her hair. An artist who moved from California to New York in 1989, Kretschmer is now forty-nine, which makes her twenty-seven years younger than Andre. She is tall and athletic-looking, with clean-cut features and short, yellow-blond hair that was damp from the shower—she had just come from the pool where she swims every day, in preparation for a marathon, open-water swim around Manhattan Island three weeks later. The apartment is cluttered but neat. File cabinets, bookshelves, a small sofa, and an even smaller desk fill half of the front room, with a sturdy Parsons table at the far end, in front of large, sliding-glass windows that offer sweeping views of downtown Manhattan. Three or four smallish, abstract collage paintings by Kretschmer hang on the walls, but there are no Andres underfoot, and nothing by other artists. We sat down at the table, and Kretschmer brought out two bottles of San Pellegrino water and a copy of “The Quincy Book,” a collection of black-and-white photographs of various sites in Quincy, Massachusetts—shipyards, granite quarries, vacant lots, estuaries, a library, a school, a cemetery, the brick house where Andre grew up, and other places that he had a photographer record because they held special meaning for him. “Carl says that if anyone wants to know about him, they should start with ‘The Quincy Book,’ ” Kretschmer explained.

At a meeting with Kretschmer a week earlier, she had told me that Andre was no longer making art. Two years ago, he was hospitalized after a fall on the street, she said, and he was having short-term-memory problems. Today, however, as I leafed through “The Quincy Book” and we talked about his childhood, Andre seemed alert and almost merry. The shoulder-length dark hair and full beard of his younger years are gone—at seventy-six, he is clean-shaven and nearly bald—but he still wears German-made, dark-blue overalls, and speaks in a voluble, rather high-pitched voice. He told a story about Konrad Fischer, his German dealer, who died in 1996. “Konrad had a tendency to call me a conceptual artist,” Andre said. “I hate being called a conceptual artist, because my work is so material. There is nothing but the floor under those plates of mine, I’d say, no ideas, nothing, zero. So I brought Konrad to Quincy, and I said, ‘Now do you see that I’m not a conceptual artist?’ And he said, ‘No, Carl, you’re a landscape artist.’ Which is actually true.”

Andre’s father, George Hans Andre, was ten years old when he came over from Sweden. A number of family members had preceded him, and found work in the manual trades in Quincy, Brockton, and other industrial towns outside Boston. George Andre avoided manual labor. Apprenticed to a designer in the Fore River Shipyard, he eventually became a master designer of freshwater plumbing for ships, a highly specialized field that was much in demand during the Second World War, when Quincy’s shipyards worked round the clock. He earned enough to forbid his wife, the former Margaret Johnson, whose Scots-Irish ancestors had been in this country and Canada since the seventeenth century, from continuing to work as an office manager, which she enjoyed. “My father always said, ‘I am old school and European, and my wife does not work,’ ” Andre said. “He had a hard time seeing other people’s points of view.” Carl was the youngest of their three children, and the only boy. He remembers that Carol, his older sister, “was very loving, and sort of took care of me, but Joan, the middle one, was a terror. When we had guests, my mother would bring the children down in their pajamas to say good night, and Joan would get behind me and pull down my pants.”

Other evenings, their father would sip sherry and read poetry aloud to them after dinner—Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” and other classics. “I developed a great taste for poetry from that,” Andre said. Before he learned to read, he remembers being fascinated by the way poetry looked in his father’s books, “by its plastic liveliness on the page compared to the dull gray clog of prose.” Once in a while, his father would give him a sip of sherry, and he developed a taste for that, too. Andre’s childhood in Quincy was “almost feral,” he said. He was allowed to roam freely with other children in the marshy tidal flats that surrounded their neighborhood, making up their own games in that pre-television era. He had no aptitude for sports, but he did well enough in the public school to be awarded a full scholarship to Phillips Academy, in Andover, one of the best prep schools in the country.

At that point, he wanted to be a scientist, but “at Andover I got the art craze,” he said, “and decided to major in art.” The Addison Gallery in Andover owned a first-rate collection of American art, and the school had a studio-art program with a wonderful teacher named Patrick Morgan. Morgan and his wife, Maud, who taught art at the Andover girls’ school, were artists themselves—Patrick had studied painting with Hans Hofmann in Munich before the war. On Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, when students could do what they wanted, Andre went to the studio to paint. A boy named Frank Stella, who was a class behind him at Andover, spent all his free time in the school’s basement studio, too, but somehow they didn’t meet. “I would be at one end, and he’d be at the other, and I don’t think we ever said hello,” Andre recalls. Michael Chapman, Andre’s best friend at the school, found this unsurprising. “Frank was not a social person,” he recalled recently. “Carl, on the other hand, was a highly visible presence. He was very, very bright, and also sort of flamboyant and outspoken, not a normal prep-school kid.”

In his senior year, Andre won the Morse prize for art. He was pretty sure he wanted to be an artist, but, he said, “there was no way my parents were going to pay for art school, so I got a scholarship to Kenyon College, in Ohio, where I studied poetry with John Crowe Ransom.” Introduced to modern poetry at Andover, he had made serious efforts to write in the cadences of Eliot, Auden, Cummings, and other favorites. But Ransom’s lectures at Kenyon put him to sleep, and the college had only makeshift studio-art facilities, so he quit going to classes. Two months into his first semester, he was asked to leave. (“Partly I drank myself out of Kenyon,” as he put it.) He moved back home to Quincy, and got a factory job. His parents were outraged. The lost scholarship! The waste! He saved his earnings, and a few months later, in 1954, he bought a plane ticket to London. “My aunt Sylvia lived there. She used to babysit for me and my sisters, and we were all madly in love with her. She was a nurse in the Second World War, in England, and she married a fighter pilot in the R.A.F., who had become a broadcaster for the BBC. They took me to Stonehenge, which was a moving experience. I was very slowly realizing my vocation as a sculptor, and Stonehenge clinched it.”

Andre’s memory was holding up pretty well. Once or twice, he would repeat something he had said earlier, or lose track of what he was saying, and calmly look to Kretschmer to bring him back. Now and then, when she offered an opinion, he would correct her irritably. The shoulder straps of his overalls kept slipping down. Andre is not a big man, and his shoulders are narrow and rounded. When he started wearing overalls exclusively, in the late sixties, people took it as a political statement—a declaration of working-class solidarity by a man who espoused Marxist doctrines and took a leading role in the anti-establishment Art Workers Coalition. Not true, he told me. “No, no, never. It was because of my belly. All my life, my weight has fluctuated enormously, and these were the only clothes that fit me.”

In 1956, after a year of military service with an Army intelligence unit in North Carolina, Andre dropped out of another college (Northeastern) in his freshman year, and went to New York. His first stop was the dorm at Columbia University where Michael Chapman, his Andover friend, was living with Barbara Rose, the future art historian. “Michael and I were undergraduate students at Columbia,” Rose recalls, “and there was no place for Carl to sleep, so we took him to the Viking Arms, a crummy rooming house on 116th Street, with toilets in the hall.” Andre soon found work as an editorial assistant at Prentice Hall. He let his hair grow long, and put himself on a diet of tea, milk, and bran muffins, which, he claims, took him from two hundred and thirty-seven pounds to a hundred and thirty-seven in a year. When Prentice Hall refused to give him a vacation because he hadn’t been there for a full year (he was one day short), he quit, and announced to Rose and Chapman, in his new, self-dramatizing mode, that he had retired from the middle class.

“It’s structured as a set of two parallel stories that no one would ever want to read.”Buy the print »

Andre and Frank Stella, who never said hello to each other at Andover, finally met in June, 1958. Stella had just graduated from Princeton and moved into a tiny loft near the Manhattan Bridge, to devote himself to painting. By then, Andre was living in a cold-water flat on Mulberry Street with Hollis Frampton, his Andover roommate, an intellectual polymath who was in the process of becoming a photographer and filmmaker. Frampton introduced Andre to Stella, and the three of them began seeing a lot of each other. “Frank was much more advanced than I was,” Andre said. Andre had just started experimenting with sculpture, carving and burning into pieces of wood he picked up on the street, but Stella had already found his direction. Inspired by Jasper Johns’s American-flag paintings, he was using cheap household enamel to apply roughly brushed colored stripes on large canvases—a process that seemed “lunatic” to Andre “because my idea of art was still related to some kind of abstraction from something outside art, and these referred to nothing but art.” That winter, Stella moved into a larger loft, on West Broadway, and began the series of precisely ruled, black-stripe paintings that would establish his reputation as a major artist. “Not being a painter, I didn’t get them at first,” Andre said. “I sort of got Frank as a person and as a mind before I got the paintings. And then one day I just suddenly saw them.” What he saw was that Stella’s severe, uniform stripes expressed an absolute commitment to painting. Stella asked Andre and Frampton to suggest titles for his new series, and two of Andre’s stuck: “Morro Castle,” after a ship that had caught fire and burned off the coast of New Jersey in 1934, and “The Marriage of Reason and Squalor,” which was a title Andre had used for one of his early allegorical drawings. Leo Castelli saw the black paintings and immediately invited Stella to join his two-year-old gallery, which represented Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and other fast-rising young art stars. Even before his first show there, the Museum of Modern Art put four black Stellas in its hugely influential “Sixteen Americans” exhibition, in December, 1959. (The catalogue note on Stella was written by Andre.) Few artists have had a more auspicious début.

Andre’s breakthrough, whose origins can be traced to the same time and the same place, took several years to materialize. He had scavenged a six-foot-long, four-by-four timber that he wanted to work on, but the Mulberry Street space he shared with Frampton was too small, so Stella told him to bring it over to his West Broadway studio. The deal was that Andre could work there when Stella was out. Surrounded by Stella’s black paintings, Andre attacked the beam with a mallet and chisel, cutting deep, roughly similar indentations on one side, in the manner of Brancusi’s “Endless Column.” Frampton, a disciple of Ezra Pound, had introduced him to Pound’s essay on Brancusi, and Andre had gone to see the Brancusi sculptures in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “Brancusi was my idol,” he told me. “So what I did was to take the timber and carve into it. I didn’t change its shape, I just cut into it. One day, I had finished carving and set it up on end, and Frank came in. He ran his hand up and down the uncarved back of the timber, and he said, ‘You know, that’s sculpture, too.’ ”

This story, told and retold in the art literature, is one of the founding myths of minimal art. The usual interpretation is the one Andre gave in a 1966 interview with the art writer David Bourdon. “Up to a certain time,” he said, “I was cutting into things. Then I realized that the thing I was cutting was the cut. Rather than cut into the material, I now use the material as the cut in space.” But is this what Stella had meant? “I thought he meant that the uncarved back was sculpture, too,” Andre said to me, “but once I was telling the story, and Frank started laughing, and I said, ‘Frank, is the story not true?’ And he said, ‘Yes, but what I meant was that you had to carve on that side, too.’ So my whole career is based on a misunderstanding!”

A month or so after this conversation, my wife and I invited the Andres and the Stellas (Frank’s wife, Harriet McGurk, is a pediatrician) to dinner at an uptown Italian restaurant. They hadn’t seen each other for years. According to Andre, Stella had said at one point that he’d “had a bellyful of Carl Andre,” but the atmosphere at dinner was warm and convivial, and in the course of it I asked Stella what he’d really meant by saying “That’s sculpture, too.” “I was just hoping he’d stop putting wood chips on everything,” Stella said, to general laughter. “But, no, I was only guessing that maybe he would work on the other side, and I just liked the piece as it was.”

“You did tell me that it ought to be carved on both sides,” Andre said.

“Did I say that?”

“Yes.”

“But there were four sides. My ‘That’s sculpture, too’ was basically saying it’s complete. The idea was there.”

I’m not sure where this leaves us. Put it down as one more example of what Marcel Duchamp referred to as “the delightful fantasy of history.”

Nobody else paid attention to Andre’s “First Ladder” (as he called his Brancusi-esque sculpture) or to the later wood pieces that Andre did in Stella’s studio—pyramid-shaped structures made of notched two-by-fours that were all the same length. Castelli passed on them. Richard Bellamy, a dealer who later showed several of the leading Pop and minimal artists at his Green Gallery, let Andre store the works in his loft on East Broadway, but the winter of 1959-60 was so cold that Bellamy ended up using them for firewood. By this time, Andre had started working on the Pennsylvania Railroad to support himself and his first wife, a schoolteacher named Barbara Brown. When I asked him how he met her, he couldn’t remember. “I’ve lost my mind,” he said, not complaining, just stating a fact. “It’s a combination of alcohol and something else—my Swedish grandmother had loss of memory, and my father did, too.”

The idea of a railroad job came from Michael Chapman, who, before going on to become a highly successful Hollywood cinematographer, had made good money on the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad in New Jersey. Andre had followed his lead, joining the union and taking a job as a freight brakeman in the railroad yards between Jersey City and Newark. For the next four years, shunting engines and freight cars and putting trains together and breaking them down, he got what he called “my advanced degree in sculpture.” The trains were made up of more or less identical elements, and a brakeman had to know about the materials he was dealing with. Andre once threw a switch too early and derailed an engine, but he readily owned up to the blunder, telling the superintendant that he had been “a damn fool,” and there were no consequences. Andre was living on East Broadway by then, with an art student at Pratt Institute named Rosemarie Castoro. (His marriage to Barbara Brown had ended a year earlier.) He usually worked the 4 P.M.-to-midnight shift, and then hit the downtown New York art bars. “I was standing against a column in Dillon’s Bar,” Castoro remembers, “and somebody came up to me and said, ‘Are you a caryatid?’ I said, ‘You call this the Erechtheion?’ And from then on Carl and I were together. I thought he looked like Richard Burton.” They were married in 1963. Andre had stopped making large wooden sculptures when he took the railroad job. He wrote concrete poetry and brief opera librettos and even briefer novels (one had twenty-five words), and he engaged in typed philosophical exchanges with Hollis Frampton—one of them would type for a while on Castoro’s Royal portable, and then the other would take over and respond. “He made a lot of little sculptures, too,” Castoro said. “He hadn’t given that up, but it was small and private.”

Pop and minimal art both emerged in the early sixties, when Abstract Expressionism, the dominant style of the forties and fifties, was running out of steam. Each of them was in some degree a reaction against the suffocating influence of Ab Ex painting, and its myth of the artist as tragic hero, but their starting points were miles apart. The Pop artists looked outward at the world around them, rather than inward to the sacred self; they painted figurative images of comic strips, commercial ads, highways, and the proliferating American popular culture of abundance and celebrity. The minimalists were more rigorous. Deeply influenced by the critical writings of Clement Greenberg, they aspired to an abstract art of extreme purity, and for Judd, Flavin, Morris, Sol LeWitt, and several others this meant an art of three-dimensional objects whose industrial (non-art) materials, repetitive elements, and conceptual rigor ruled out all traces of the artist’s personal touch. Minimal art had not even been named when Andre quit his railroad job, in the spring of 1964. Soon afterward, he got a call from E. C. Goosen, who was curating a group show of the new, pared-down abstraction that October at the Hudson River Museum, in Yonkers. Goosen, a teacher and art historian, had remembered seeing one of Andre’s wooden pyramids five years earlier, in Stella’s studio, and he asked if he could have it for the exhibition. Since the original had been used for firewood, Andre made a new one. It was his first appearance in a public space.

“I want you to switch from alchemy and shape-shifting to job creation.”Buy the print »

Other invitations followed. Barbara Rose, who had broken up with Michael Chapman and had married Frank Stella (Andre introduced them), was becoming an influential and entrepreneurial critic in the rapidly changing art world of the nineteen-sixties. She helped to get Andre into an important group exhibition of minimalist work that she was co-curating at the Tibor de Nagy gallery, on East Seventy-second Street, in January, 1965, and to have his first one-man show there, in April. That summer, while canoeing with a friend on a New Hampshire lake, he had an epiphany. “It was late afternoon, and there was no wind, so the surface of the water was completely smooth,” Andre told me. “I was wondering at the time whether my configurations should all be the same height or different heights.” Looking at the lake from a few inches above its placid surface, he decided that his next work should be as level as water. This was when Andre moved beyond sculpture conceived as form (carving into timbers) or as structure (pyramids of notched two-by-fours, stacks of identical elements) into what he called “sculpture as place,” where he has been ever since.

For his next show at Tibor de Nagy, the following March, he made a series of eight floor-hugging sculptures of whitish, sand-lime construction bricks—a hundred and twenty bricks to each, stacked in two layers and arranged in eight different geometrical shapes. He called them “Equivalents,” borrowing Alfred Stieglitz’s title for his cloud photographs without explaining the connection. My guess is that nobody tried to walk on the “Equivalents”—the bricks were not attached, and they would have been wobbly—but the idea must have occurred to viewers as they navigated the narrow spaces between the configurations. The idea came through even more strongly a month later, in Andre’s contribution to “Primary Structures,” at the Jewish Museum, the first large-scale, museum presentation of work that would be identified a year later as minimal art. Amid quantities of sculptures by forty-two American and British artists, Andre’s “Lever,” a single row of a hundred and thirty-seven bricks that started at the back wall of one gallery and ran into another, could hardly escape notice. Viewers had to step over it or detour around it to see the rest of the show.

“Primary Structures” brought bankable recognition to several of the artists involved, including Andre, who joined the Virginia Dwan gallery soon afterward. In his second show there, in December, 1967, he introduced the metal-plate sculptures that would most clearly define his notion of sculpture as place. There were three of them in the show: large rectangles, each made up of a hundred and forty-four one-foot-square plates that were less than half an inch thick—aluminum plates in one, hot-rolled steel in another, zinc in the third. Andre felt he was on to something ancient and essential, a link between sculpture and human activity that was as old as Stonehenge and the Neolithic mounds he had seen as a teen-ager in southern England. “My idea of a piece of sculpture is a road,” as he wrote in 1970. “All my works have implied, to some degree or another, a spectator moving along them or around them.”

Minimal art never received the degree of media attention (mostly scathing) that gave Pop art such instant notoriety, but from the outset it was taken seriously by critics, both here and abroad. In Düsseldorf, where there was a strong avant-garde art community, a young German painter named Konrad Fischer scraped together enough money to open a small gallery, and invited Andre, LeWitt, and Bruce Nauman to present solo shows there in 1967. Fischer had no money to pay for shipping art works. He sent Andre a cheap ticket on Lufthansa Airlines, and Andre made the show when he got there—a long rectangle of steel plates that exactly coincided with the gallery’s floor space, so that visitors had to walk on it. Fischer became his most important dealer after that, placing his work in prominent European collections, and helping to arrange shows in European galleries and museums.

In New York, Andre, no longer penniless but far from rich (his metal-plate pieces were priced from about fifteen thousand to forty thousand dollars), was rapidly becoming one of the more visible personalities at Max’s Kansas City, a sprawling restaurant and bar on lower Park Avenue whose owner, Mickey Ruskin, had made it an artist hangout by accepting art works in lieu of cash. Andy Warhol and his entourage had their regular table in the back. Andre sat at the bar, or at a front table with Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, and other brainy artists of his generation. Andre and Smithson were great talkers, whose wide reading in the sciences, history, philosophy, and aesthetics gave them plenty of verbal leverage. Andre’s style was polemical, decrying the national shame of the Vietnam War, denouncing Pop art for its “parasitical” embrace of bourgeois culture, not infrequently revising his opinions in mid-argument. People who didn’t like him thought he was an arrogant blowhard. His drink then was red wine, ordered by the pitcher, or champagne when he felt flush. “I could drink to the point of oblivion, without passing out,” he said. He could also be extremely nasty to artists he considered mediocre. “I don’t want that piece of shit at my table,” one artist remembers him yelling at someone. “He’s not an artist, he’s garbage.” Drunken fights sometimes broke out among the macho artists at Max’s, but Andre was never involved in them. “I couldn’t fight my way out of a cookie jar,” he told me. Andre was also known to be extremely generous to other artists, and amazingly successful with women. “He was very sweet and attentive and supportive,” according to Lucy Lippard, one of the more perceptive art critics, who had a brief affair with him in 1971. “You got lots of notes and things.” Twice during our discussions, Andre told me that he had always felt more comfortable with women than with men.

Andre was still married to Rosemarie Castoro, who had become a recognized painter. They had moved from Brooklyn to a small apartment on Spring Street in Manhattan, and at night, when she’d finished doing freelance layouts for a printer, she would go to meet Andre at Max’s. “If I didn’t do that,” she said, “he would stay out all night. Lots of attractive women there.” I asked her what women saw in Andre. “Good-looking man,” she said, laughing. “Richard Burton! And he had a Google memory. He was my dear, the love of my life, but, you know, things happen. There were too many women.” They separated in the late sixties, and divorced in 1970, but for years afterward they frequently met at a restaurant, to play chess. When I went to see Castoro, in the Spring Street loft they once shared (she still lives and works there), she showed me the chess board that Carl had made, by sewing together dark and light squares of leather—a mini-Andre, unsigned. The pieces are doorknobs that he altered or screwed together. Rosemarie usually won.

In 1970, when Andre was only thirty-five, the Guggenheim Museum gave him a full-dress retrospective. Selections of his work since 1964 in wood, bricks, acrylic blocks, metal plates, and typed word-poems were shown in the spiral galleries, while on the ground floor, visible from any point in the museum, was his recently completed “37 Pieces of Work.” A thirty-six-foot square of metal plates in six materials—aluminum, steel, copper, zinc, lead, magnesium—it was Andre’s largest sculpture so far, and what he called his “erotic relationship with materials” came through in the subtle play of colors, surface textures, tonalities, mass, weight, and reflected light across the checkerboard of twelve hundred and ninety-six interacting elements. The sensuous aura of the piece filled the famous atrium, and challenged the prevailing view of minimal art as an arid, cerebral enterprise bereft of craftsmanship or skill. Reviewing the show in the Times, Peter Schjeldahl wrote that, except for a few early pieces, “each object . . . presents itself to the viewer with an aggressive air of completeness and finality, as if each were the only, or anyway the last, work of art in the world.” Andre told me that Thomas Messer, the Guggenheim’s longtime director, had been against doing the show. “There have always been people who heartily detest my work, and think it’s fakery,” Andre said, and apparently Messer was one of them. Diane Waldman, the museum’s chief curator, had pushed him into it. “Messer told me it was probably a good thing,” Andre said, “because my work would now receive the ridicule it deserved.” The reviews were mostly positive, however, and Andre’s career moved to another level.

For the next few years, he showed with John Weber, who had taken over many of the Dwan gallery’s artists when Virginia Dwan closed her gallery, in 1971. Andre became involved romantically with Weber’s bright and highly competent young gallery assistant, Angela Westwater. She left the gallery in 1972 to become the managing editor of Artforum, but their relationship continued, off and on, for about seven years, and in 1975, when she opened a New York gallery in partnership with Andre’s European dealers Konrad Fischer and Gian Enzo Sperone, Andre came along. “I really sold a lot of his work,” Westwater remembers. In 1972, Weber had sold three Andres to the Tate, including “First Ladder” and “Equivalents VIII,” one of his 1966 brick pieces, which had to be remade with ordinary firebricks because the sand-lime originals, unsold, had been returned to the brick factory and could no longer be replaced. “Equivalents VIII” drew no comment when it appeared in two Tate exhibitions, but in 1976, on a slow-news day, the London Sunday Times ran a story on the Tate’s having spent tax-supported funds for a hundred and twenty ordinary bricks (“THE TATE DROPS A COSTLY BRICK”) and an uproar ensued. More than seven hundred news stories weighed in on the issue, along with countless radio and television talkers, most of them deriding the museum and the artist. “That piece was like a lightning conductor for a whole set of attitudes in Britain,” according to Nicholas Serota, the Tate’s current director, “and for a long period afterward the Tate was rather less ambitious in its acquisitions.” Andre declined to be interviewed about it on the BBC by his uncle, the one who had taken him to Stonehenge twenty years earlier. “The temptation to make a fool of myself would have been enormous,” he said.

Reviewing Andre’s 1970 Guggenheim show in Artforum, Roberta Smith had raised the question of where he could go from there. “He cannot change too much without undermining the power of his original statement,” she wrote. It was a legitimate concern, which Andre has managed successfully to ignore. He avoided the trap of repeating himself by finding new materials to use, and new ways of using his old materials. “The periodic table of elements is for me what the color spectrum is for a painter,” he announced in 1980. “My ambition as an artist is to be the ‘Turner of matter.’ ” In addition to the six metals in “37 Pieces of Work,” he has worked in silver, nickel, and tin (“my favorite metal to use”), and in marble, steel pipe, sheet brass, graphite, Belgian blue limestone, gas-beton block, aluminum ingots, and Icelandic basalt. He has experimented, in very small units, with bismuth, indium, and metal cadmium (which is highly poisonous), and on two occasions he has used 18k. gold—in 1966, for a two-inch-square wafer purchased by the collector Vera List, and in 1995 for sixty one-centimetre gold squares wrapped in a Glarner Tüechli bandanna, as a present for Melissa Kretschmer. His sculptures took new shapes and conformations—corner pieces, coiling ribbons of silver and lead, stacks of aluminum ingots. Andre has also returned, again and again, to wood, “the mother of matter,” as he once described it, which, “like all women hacked and ravaged by men . . . renews herself by giving, gives herself by renewing.” Some of his later, totemic groupings of Western red-cedar timbers stand three feet high, and are more like barriers than like roads, but their orientation is not vertical; they drive downward, into the earth, and their tactile presence—the pungent aroma, the rough, splintery surfaces, the mass and weight and feel of the familiar wood—affects many viewers (this one included) at a very deep level. No sculpture duplicates another, although the differences can be hard to see. With a few exceptions—such as his massive, 1977 “Stone Field” of glacial boulders, on a public site in Hartford, Connecticut—Andre has stuck to working with materials he can assemble himself, with his own hands.

As one of the most successful and respected American artists of the nineteen-seventies and eighties, Andre travelled widely, making new work and showing it at leading galleries and museums. He gave many interviews, served on art panels and juries, coined aphorisms (“Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us”; “Capitalism must be holy because religion is a business”), and gave money or tactical aid to artists whose needs were more pressing than his own. Although he bought no country houses or cars or art treasures, he enjoyed good food in expensive restaurants, where he insisted on picking up the check and treating his friends to excellent champagne. The market for minimal art fell off in the late seventies and eighties, but Andre’s reputation did not. His place in art history seemed secure; his life and his work flowed together in a single stream.

In the fall of 1979, Andre met a thirty-year-old artist named Ana Mendieta, who was having her first one-person show at the A.I.R. gallery, in New York. Their love affair, which began soon afterward, was more intense and far more turbulent than anything Andre had experienced. Mendieta came from a wealthy and distinguished family in Cuba. In 1960, when she was eleven, her father fell out of favor with the Castro regime, and the following year Ana and her older sister were sent for safekeeping to the United States. The loneliness and misery of foster homes in the Midwest made Ana a rebel. She discovered art in high school, majored in it at the University of Iowa, stayed on for a graduate degree, and developed an original and somewhat morbid style of art-making which combined elements of performance art and earth art; she used her tiny but voluptuous body (she was four feet ten inches tall) in direct and visceral encounters with raw nature. Clearly talented, she had a compelling and vivid personality—volatile, enchanting, insecure, hot-tempered, and fiercely ambitious. Andre’s friends liked her, but the relationship made them uneasy. Andre had his own doubts about it. Paula Cooper, who replaced Angela Westwater as his dealer in 1978, remembers him saying to her once, very sadly, “It’ll never work—a New England puritan and a Latina.”

Andre admired Mendieta’s work and introduced her to art-world insiders who could advance her already burgeoning career. She won a Guggenheim grant in 1980, and three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1983 she was awarded a Prix de Rome. They travelled together in Europe. He rented an apartment for them in Rome, but his busy schedule kept them apart a lot. Increasingly, when they were together, they fought. Both of them drank too much, and when Mendieta got drunk her anger would spill over in public. Lawrence Weiner remembers her screaming, “Maricón! Maricón! Maricón!” at him on the street, and Andre saying, “Shut up! Shut up!” They separated for several months in 1984, and then, to their friends’ amazement, they reconciled and got married in Rome, in January, 1985. It didn’t work. By early summer, Mendieta was telling her sister and others that she was collecting evidence of Andre’s liaison with a woman in Berlin, as grounds for a divorce. That September, she fell to her death, after a night of heavy drinking with Andre in the Mercer Street apartment.

Twenty-six years later, the tragedy still evokes bitterly opposing reactions. Mendieta’s friends and allies—many of whom were active in the feminist movement in the eighties—have never doubted that he killed her, and they cite the arguments offered at the trial, such as Ana’s extreme fear of heights, which would have kept her away from the bedroom’s high, sliding-glass windows, and her excitement over the many new art projects she was developing, which ruled against suicide. Jack S. Hoffinger, the head of Andre’s defense team, had stunned the judge, Alvin Schlesinger, and the courtroom by announcing that Andre wished to waive his right to a jury trial. Most states allow this, but defense lawyers rarely recommend it; they believe a jury of twelve people is more subject to doubts, and therefore less likely to convict, than a single presiding magistrate. Andre’s aloof and self-isolating courtroom manner—immersing himself in books or magazines at every pause or recess, showing no hint of emotion—had not endeared him to anyone, however, and Andre and Hoffinger had decided to take their chances with the judge. Schlesinger’s verdict, delivered on February 11, 1988, proved them right. The evidence, he said, was not sufficient to satisfy him beyond a reasonable doubt that Andre was guilty. Andre left the courtroom a free man, saying, “Justice has been served.”

Most of Andre’s friends agree that no one will ever know what happened between Carl and Ana. Angela Westwater, who says she was abused verbally but never physically by Andre, is convinced that it must have been “a total accident.” The evidence to convict him was not there, but the shadow did not lift. A year later, at a dinner at P.S.1, the Queens art center, Konrad Fischer came in late, leading a clearly reluctant Andre, who turned and fled when several women rose to their feet, shouting, “Murderer! Get out!” Lucy Lippard, the feminist art critic, took a lot of flak from her friends because she refused to convict Andre before he went on trial. She had dinner with him before the trial, and said, “ ‘I don’t want to know what happened that night, but do you know?’ He said, ‘No.’ And I said, ‘Well, you’d better remember.’ ”

I didn’t think that Andre would talk to me about this. I even suspected that the recurrent references, in our conversations, to his loss of memory might be a way of deflecting the question in advance. Melissa Kretschmer told me she had never asked him about it; she trusts him completely, and tries to shield him from what she calls “the haters.” In my last meeting with Andre, I asked if it was true, as many people believe, that he had been too drunk on the night in question to remember what happened. To my surprise, he began to speak about it, slowly and quietly, in a way that seemed more focussed than usual. “I was asleep,” he said. “I was in bed, when I heard cries of ‘No, no, no.’ It had been quite balmy, like eighty degrees, and the temperature went down to about sixty all of a sudden. What Ana did was to get up and start closing the windows, because cold air was blowing in. Ana had to climb up—she was, you know, barely five feet. To close those windows you had to do it from the middle, so they wouldn’t jam. And in trying to close those windows she just lost her balance.” At the trial, a doorman testified that he had heard, a few seconds before the body landed on the roof of a Mercer Street deli, a woman’s voice, high up, screaming “No, no, no.” Andre’s referring to the cries was striking, and I brought him back to it. “Something had awakened me,” he said. “Maybe it was the fact that Ana wasn’t there, next to me in the bed. I expected to see her there, so I was caught half awake and half asleep.” And the cries? I asked. “That was Ana.”

The longer I live, the more unreliable and even quixotic my own memory seems to me. Andre’s late-summer revelation is probably not going to change anyone’s thinking. He appears to have made peace with his own memories, at any rate, and this may explain how he has managed, for so long, to live with the shadow of Ana Mendieta’s terrible death. “It will be with me for the rest of my life,” he said. “But it’s something I don’t dwell on.” He also said that Melissa Kretschmer had “saved my life.” Kretschmer told me that until a few years ago, when his health began to break down, they would usually watch a movie over dinner at home and then Andre would stay up most of the night, drinking. It would be going too far to say that he has been in a prison of his own making for twenty-six years, but his willed solitude is like a second skin. “To myself, I am invisible,” he told me. “I’ve always been hiding out. It’s my delusion. But I’ve been very lucky. Things have befallen me, and I haven’t succumbed.”

He has also continued to work, as an artist, at a very high level. Nicholas Serota told me he thought some pieces Andre had done since 1985 are “as good as anything he’s ever made, and as good as anyone else is making. He’s become deeper in some respects.” Top-quality Andres are increasingly in demand. The French collector François Pinault is said to have paid more than six million dollars for “37th Piece of Work,” when it came on the market privately, in 2006, and since then it has been resold—presumably for a lot more—to a collection in the Middle East. (This is the piece, slightly retitled, that dominated Andre’s Guggenheim show in 1970.) More recent works have brought up to two and a half million dollars at Paula Cooper’s, and some of the buyers are American. The Dia retrospective will be about equally divided between early and later work. Philippe Vergne does not anticipate angry protesters at the opening, although the possibility cannot be ruled out. “Carl broke something, and he was ostracized, and it’s part of the story,” Vergne said to me. “But the work is there. We are a museum, not a court of law, and he is one of the most important artists of our time.”

Toward the end of our last conversation, Andre brought up what he called his genetic heritage. “I’ve never had relatives working in a trade where there was no product,” he said. “They added to the world, and I always thought I was adding to the stock of images in the world. If it was already in the world, I wasn’t interested. I feel I’ve done the work I was destined to do.” ♦